Elvin Cena had chased a breakout since 2020. It finally arrived in February. It did not come from years of grinding in the studio. It came from an hour of typing prompts into an AI programme. And it left him unsure whether he could call the song his own.
From a shelved demo to a chart hit
The 21-year-old Rwandan artist, currently studying in France, recorded ‘Let Me Be’ as a straightforward studio track about six months before it exploded. He wrote the melody and the lyrics himself. The production disappointed him, so he shelved it. Rather than let it go, he uploaded the song to Suno AI and started reshaping it. He asked for something danceable, an amapiano foundation, and a woman’s voice on the second verse.
The result was an amapiano-inflected track about the freedom of a night out. Cena did not want to release something AI-shaped under his own name. He uploaded it to a new channel called The Second Voice, a name for the AI vocal rather than a person, and left it there.
The song he could not fully claim
He did not see what happened next coming. The track spread across TikTok and turned up in more than 50,000 videos. It passed a million YouTube views within three days while Cena refreshed the page in disbelief. It climbed as high as number 12 in France and the top 16 in Belgium. It reached the top 10 in both Kenya and Tanzania. Listeners praised its “angelic” female vocal, unaware it belonged to no one at all.
Once the momentum became undeniable, Cena made a decision. He cut an official music video and credited it to The Second Voice featuring Elvin Cena. Then he used the moment to promote his own name and back catalogue, which includes earlier singles such as ‘Ka Sa Lo’ and ‘Jejeli’.
A line he is still drawing
Cena is not shy about where he stands. On whether he feels guilt about listeners discovering the song’s AI origins, he was direct: “I’m an artist too [and] I don’t want to be associated with AI 100%.” He accepts AI as a tool for testing ideas, tightening production or breaking a creative block. He rejects it as a replacement for writing and performing a song outright. He also notes that the melody and lyrics existed before he typed a single prompt.
His view of the wider trend is more relaxed than most. He compares today’s unease around AI music to the suspicion that once surrounded the internet. He expects the discomfort to fade as the technology turns ordinary.
His case lands at an uneasy moment for the platform behind it. Suno AI reportedly generates roughly seven million songs a day. Licensing talks between Suno and major labels, Universal and Sony among them, have stalled. Those negotiations happen far from Rwanda, Kenya or Tanzania. Those are the countries where ‘Let Me Be’ is actually charting, and where AI-made music arrived well before the industry agreed on any rules.
For an artist who spent six years building a modest, real following one song at a time, the irony stings. His biggest hit took thirty minutes to make. It is the one he is least sure he gets to keep.